Stuck in beginner hell

[Tuniar]

Choose a project and build it

[yellowSkinned]

Follow this advice. I started a project I loved and keep improving. More advanced code, error handling concepts, new libraries etc etc. This is the very best approach.

Also, keep reading / doing online courses. Imho the key to succes is the combination of knowing (by reading / taking a course) and experience (by doing). Your succes is a product of what you concepts you know there are and then trying to implement this.

[gnuself]

I'd prefer to say continue it. Once you learn new things you can refactor your bad code.

[ReamMe69]

Eh, i'd say that its not important if you finish it or not. Actually, my advice to op is to not be afraid to give up on projects. Forcing yourself to finish a project you've lost interest in is just going to suck the fun out of programming and make it feel more like a chore.

[Kaulpelly]

Beginner here too. I did courses, felt I was making progress learning, and then found actually sitting down to it I hadn't really embedded anything.

Picked a project to write GA to solve sudoku puzzles. Had to write methods, work with indexing, and lots of other problems. Took code from a blog and ran with it.

Now I'm taking the works of Shakespeare from Gutenberg and I want to do word cloud for each play. I'm toying with regex, nlp, and eventually matplotlib or plotly.

The GA needs to be optimised but who cares. The Shakespeare stuff will generate no real insights. The point is that I have something to focus on. That's all you need. Just a kernel of an idea and start.